The invention relates to the field of semiconductors and more particularly to a transferred electron device (TED).
Transferred electron device, or Gunn effect diodes, are widely used in ultrahigh frequency equipment. Their low oscillator noise, their robustness, their compactness, their modest cost and their reduced bias voltage designate them quite particularly as local oscillator or an emission source in radars, Doppler radars and certain short wave links. For ten years or so, the performances have been increased up to the band of millimetric waves. Indium phosphide InP diodes have given, in continuous operation, up to 250 mW at 56 GHZ, 125 mW at 94 GHz with respective efficiencies of 8% and 4%.
The invention aims at improving the performances of millimetric Gunn effect diodes. For that, a new transferred electron device is proposed, for the millimetric band, whose purpose is to overcome the defects of Gunn diodes which limit their performances: dead zone, relaxation phenomena and resistance of the contacts particularly.